A Conversation with Featured Author Douglas Hackle
- Dina
- Jun 26
- 9 min read
Updated: Jun 26
Batshit-Insane, Unhinged, and Recklessly Silly
As soon as we read Douglas Hackle's story submission, our editor in chief declared that she wanted to pick the author's brain. Luckily for us, Douglas agreed to an interactive interview with Senior Editor Dina Dwyer. Enjoy the weirdness that ensued.
Dina Dwyer: So, like, what’s your deal, man?
Douglas Hackle: Damn, a hardball right out the gate. Let’s see. I’m a writer of a certain flavor of weird/bizarre/bizarro/surreal/whacky fiction. To date, I’ve put out three short novels and three short story collections. Haven’t written or published anything in a minute.
DD: I’ve read all I could find online. There are many strange ideas that come together in “Please, God, Don’t Let Dogs Die Anymore” and basically all of your stories, that make the narrative(s) so delightful. I’d love to hear about how you invented them and decided they should go to a rave together.
DH: All you could find online, eh? I’m afraid to look to see what that might entail. Some of that stuff probably hasn’t aged well and could likely use a fresh edit and/or a fresh boot stomping. But good on you for taking a look!
Story ideas come to me at random times. They include weird “what if?” premises, bizarre scenarios, odd fragments of dialogue, story titles, etc. I add the ones I like to a Word file. Some of these ideas eventually become stories. Others live indefinitely as ideas, hoping one day to be born. Sometimes I’ll take two or three such ideas and mash them together to create a story.
In the case of “Please, God, Don’t Let Dogs Die Anymore,” a few years back, I opened said file and typed something like: “Dude’s never brushed his teeth—EVER. Dude might even be kinda proud of the fact, too.” However, I wasn’t immediately compelled to write a story based on the idea. That’s why having an idea file is great: You can always come back to stuff later with a fresh mindset and new enthusiasm.
When I came back to this particular idea, I think my mom had recently asked me to say a prayer for some “missing” feral cats she had been feeding or somesuch. I’m not overly religious, but I have no issues with the idea of prayer as a release of positive vibes/energy into the universe. Anyhow, point being, my mom got me thinking about prayer for a second. Also, my family lost one of our two dogs last year—the dog my now 18-year-old son grew up with. So these considerations somehow merged with the “dude has never brushed his teeth” idea to become “Please, God, Don’t Let Dogs Die Anymore.”
DD: There are pieces I’ve let “rot” for years only to reanimate with a new life on a whim. But how do you trust yourself to write these wild stories in the first place? I struggle with letting myself really wander in my own fiction. Too much booklearning and workshopping I’m afraid. I’d love to really, as DJ Baby Boomer says every Friday at 5pm on his show on Portland’s jazz radio station, “Shake the shackles of the man off our backs” and go hog wild. So, tell me, have you made a blood pact somewhere? What’s the secret?
DH: You might say going hog wild is my raison d'être when it comes to writing. In some ways, my stories are just fun exercises in how to break the rules of storytelling. For better or worse, writing these unhinged stories just comes naturally to me. I suppose the ability to continually do that, to “shake off the shackles” as you say, is inherently tied up in my motivation to write in the first place. For one, there’s the motivation to create something that feels novel. Ignoring, shattering, or otherwise setting the rules of storytelling on fire can be conducive to that.
A second but equally important motivating factor for me is to have fun—fun both writing the thing and reading the thing. If I feel like I’m creating something that kinda hasn’t been done before and I’m having fun while doing it, there’s a fair chance I’ll finish a first draft at the very least.
DD: I agree with all of that. My favorite piece I’ve written isn’t exactly “approachable” but I had the most fun writing it. Last night, my husband and I were talking about our love for artists who devote their genius and talent to wholeheartedly bizarre/funny projects. Like The Lonely Island guys, Ween, and David Lynch for a few examples. Or this song. I mean, just listen to that for a few seconds and tell me that’s not like perfect lo-fi indie irreverence. What drove you initially and continually to not just coloring outside the lines but off the damn page with such joie de vivre? Origin story, I guess.
DH: I suppose the drive comes from a desire to create something that feels new. I recall even way back when as a younger reader frequently encountering certain standard claims in the reviewer praise and author blurbs found inside and on the back covers of books, phrases like “wholly original,” “truly unique,” and “unlike anything ever written!” But in many (most?) cases, if you investigate further, you discover that this book that some reviewer raved is “unlike anything ever written!” is in fact very much like, say, Stephen King or Tolkien or Gaiman or Palahniuk or Hemingway or Carver or Ellroy or Pynchon, etc.
Maybe it’s true that there’s only seven basic plot types, and that, as storytellers, we’re forever trapped within those confines. It’s often said that it’s the “execution” that matters as we continue to ply the long-established and inescapable tropes, character archetypes, and story patterns that are possible in narrative—that “execution” can lead to a sort of uniqueness or freshness or newness. Maybe that’s true.
But I believe something special, magical even, can happen when you purposely write without ANY boundaries or constraints on your imagination—in a word, going hog wild. When you create in this manner, you can’t predict the unexpected places the writing might take you, places that, if not entirely original only because of the impossibility of attaining true originality, at least resonate with the spirit of true originality, if that makes any sense.
One of my short stories, “The Scream, My Dog,” is about an aging slaughterhouse worker who, every Friday night, drives his piece-of-shit car out onto a country road that gradually transforms into Munch's painting The Scream, whereupon the iconic screaming figure hops into the car and the pair drive out of the painting to the dance clubs downtown to engage in an always cringey, always unsuccessful attempt to get laid. Now, it’s entirely possible that someone else—multiple people, even—conceived, wrote, and even published this story before I did. However, it’s also possible that, for better or worse, I wrote the first (and last?) aging-slaughterhouse-worker-and-The Scream-go-clubbing-every-Friday-night story.
DD: Right on. I think playfulness and silliness and all the friends of nonsense literature are extremely important in life. I take it very seriously, this business of being a goofball. In what ways do you find these elements in your life outside of the word processor/weird art on the page?
DH: I’m a goofball, too. So, yeah, there’s that. Humor and silliness are sort of the palatable/positive side of absurdity. Humor largely arises out of incongruity, and the ultimate incongruity might be the condition of philosophical absurdity. Somewhat ironically, then, humor and not taking life too seriously are effective ways of coping with that absurdity. Did I just misuse the word “ironic” like Alanis Morissette did infamously in her hit song “Ironic”? Maybe. The word trips me up sometimes. I also screw up “stalactite” and “stalagmite.” Like, which one grows up and which grows down? I can never keep them straight, damn it.
DD: Yeah, I think it’s how I cope with a very strange and ofttimes sad place we live in. I try not to take most things seriously. There’s too much good stuff going on all the time. Like music! I noticed you play the classical guitar beautifully. What connection can you draw from that to your style of writing (they seem quite different)?
DH: Thank you! There’s a connection, albeit an indirect one. Playing classical guitar is difficult for me. I don’t have any natural talent for it. Anything I can do on the guitar is simply the result of a lot of hard work and time. So playing guitar has taught me discipline. I like to think I bring that discipline to my writing: As batshit-insane, unhinged, and recklessly silly as my fiction can be, I always try to craft it with care.
DD: That makes a lot of sense. There has to be some kind of refinement/regulation in the editing process. Do you show your writing to anyone at any stage? And how do you know when to stick a fork in it?
DH: I don’t typically show my writing to others until it’s done. If I make it to the end of a draft, then it’s a matter of revising, stepping away, revising again, maybe wash/rinse/repeat a few times. In the case of my collections and novellas, an editor or two will have a pass before I put anything out there in the world. Back when I was writing and publishing more actively, I’d also get beta readers involved whenever possible.
As far as “Please, God…” goes, I sent it out the day after I wrote it and after revising it just twice! I never do that. Scandalous, right? Talk about living on the edge! Needless to say, I’m thrilled you guys picked it up.
DD: Oh, we loved it. It's a total whopper. Say, are there any authors or films or any kind of weird art you’ve discovered in the last few years that you’d say had an influence on your own stuff?
DH: Hm, the problem here is that I haven’t written much of anything these last few years, so your question is sort of inapplicable, unfortunately. I’m either in the midst of some prolonged writer’s block or else caught in the veritable Death Throes of the Author—cue sad violin music. However, off the top of my head, Daniil Kharms, Brian Evenson, Laird Barron, Samuel Beckett, George Saunders, Brian Bowyer, Zoltán Komor, and Charles Austin Muir are a few recently read or recently revisited writers I could see influencing my own stuff if I ever find my way back to it. Oh, I should probably clarify that “Please, God, Don’t Let Dogs Die Anymore” is the first thing I’ve written in quite some time. It’s like some sort of weird unplanned baby. Film-wise, I watched David Lynch: The Art Life not too long ago and found it inspiring. Maybe watching that helped me take a break from The Big Block to bang out “Please, God…”
DD: You live in Ohio, I see. I’m from the Midwest but I’ve only been to Ohio once. You’re from Cleveland, which is on the northern end. I once went to Cincinnati, where I was served an artichoke for the first time and it was so awful I avoided them for years. Please, tell me three positive things about Ohio to correct that impression.
DH: Yes, our little fly-over state is not renowned for the quality of its artichokes. However ...
We tend not to have wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, or floods!
We have Cedar Point (some of the best rollercoasters in the world)!
In Ohio, after enjoying the day’s first cup of coffee, you may suddenly feel compelled to rebuke the doleful, browbeaten droop-dogs led by the angry anvil-attorneys congregating outside the walls of Fuckville, Bulgaria back when a promise was still a plonk, long before those proto-Prussian loop-puppets began accusing us of not lollygagging with seventeen woebegone Spanish-Arabian twerk-lobsters in a surging chatter-spill of blue tattletale-wolves outside the panic-soup eventuality within the basement-attic of Frown-Town. If. Of. CREE-CRAW?
DD: Yee-haw, cree-craw! Well, as we wind down, do you have any final thoughts, especially those on clowns?
DH: Ah, clowns, right? It always comes down to clowns. They’re everywhere. Amirite, amirite? There’s a teeny-tiny clown at the center of every atom’s nucleus, a colossal one at the center of every supermassive black hole. And they’re nowhere. Amirite, amirite? I daresay, in the end we’re all clowns—tiny THUMB-PUPPET clowns doomed to clown around FROWN-TOWN with a swoop-gaggle of woebegone Spanish-Arabian twerk-lobsters.
DD: Hell yeah, brother. Thanks so much for chatting with me, Douglas!
DH: My pleasure. Thank you for the interview!
Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. Dude had awesome hair, too. Seriously, Google him if you don’t believe me. Aw, crap—I was supposed to write a bio for Douglas Hackle, not Frederick Douglass. Damn it! Man, I had one job to do—right?—and I totally effed it up. Hey, the names are kinda similar though, no? Honest mistake. https://douglashackle.wordpress.com/
